It was 1968, she was 15 years old, and she and nine other deaf black students had just enrolled in an integrated school for the deaf in Talledega, Ala.

When the teacher got up to address the class, McCaskill was lost...

"I was dumbfounded," McCaskill recalls through an interpreter. "I was like, 'What in the world is going on?'"

The teacher's quicksilver hand movements looked little like the sign language McCaskill had grown up using at home with her two deaf siblings and had practiced at the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and Blind, just a few miles away.

"Curricula may differ between schools in segregated educational systems"

Sign language is like any other language: there are many regional dialects and styles, and just because you know,say, American Sign Language doesn't mean you can speak to someone who speaks, say, British or French orGerman Sign Language.

And even in ASL, the regional variation in 'words' can trip people up. My wife studied sign for many years, and toldme that the sign in NYC that she learned for 'shoe' (tapping your fists together in front of you) meant 'homosexual'in California.

And then there was the story one of her fellow students told in class about a couple who were going on theirhoneymoon to London, but unfortunately the student wrote the presentation using a very old ASL dictionary. Thesign that used to mean 'London' when the book was published has morphed into a sign that is about the mostuncomplimentary term you can think of for 'lesbian'. I once told the story to someone who was a native ASLspeaker (his parents were deaf, though he was not), and when I used that sign, he went pale, practically grabbedmy arms and told me with grave seriousness "Do NOT ever use that sign with a deaf person!"